Dave Bonta's short poem starts from a bleak admission: "no laws will save us." Rules and institutions can't be counted on, and the "old simple manner that used to do" has gone too. Whatever worked before, the speaker suggests, no longer works, and nothing has yet taken its place.
What the poem offers instead is a strange, appealing image. Danger becomes "an instrument / made of questions." Rather than something to flee, danger is something you play, and it produces uncertainty, not answers. The title, "How to resist," hangs over all of this, so the poem reads like a quiet attempt at a plan.
The last line is the most personal: "I must be at home with hope." The speaker doesn't say they feel hopeful. They say they must learn to live there, as if hope were a place to settle into on purpose. The mood is sober and tense, but steady, with a determined calm beneath the worry.